davidmartin wrote: ↑Fri Dec 06, 2019 6:37 pm That Paul is battling 'Judaisers' lets call them Nazarenes suggests to me they had their own gospel with theological differences and they did!
Then that as far as we know Paul never provided a gospel to his churches, may indicate those he founded initially resisted gospels completely
Mark may even be the gospel made for those churches
The NT is full of reports of these factions some obvious some not so obvious
Well, alright, but in this context I don't think there were any written gospels, and in my view the only difference between Paul's (unwritten) gospel and let's definitely say the Nazarenes' (unwritten) gospel was that Paul taught that Jewish Torah observance was no longer necessary (at least for attaining salvation in the Messianic age) and the Nazarenes taught that it was.
That Matthew uses Mark could be explained by having Matthew itself be a combination of Mark and the Nazarene gospel, which I think was brought about by a merger of Pauline and Nazarene factions around that time.
Well, as Ben and I have been noting, while Mark does have Pauline elements, it is also pro-Torah, like the Nazarenes. So in my view Mark is as Nazarene as Matthew, and I would suppose that that was why they were combined in the NT version.